Georgia Institute of Technology School of Mathematics | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

<p>Given a Hamiltonian system, normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds and their stable and unstable manifolds are important landmarks that organize the long term behaviour.</p> <p>When the stable and unstable manifolds of a normally hyperbolic invarriant manifold intersect transversaly, there are homoclinic orbits that converge to the manifold both in the future and in the past. Actually, the orbits are asymptotic both in the future and in the past.</p><p> One can construct approximate orbits of the system by chainging several of these homoclinic excursions.</p> <p>A recent result with M. Gidea and T. M.-Seara shows that if we consider long enough such excursions, there is a true orbit that follows it. This can be considered as an extension of the classical shadowing theorem, that allows to handle some non-hyperbolic directions</p>

Classical Kazhdan's theorem for Riemann surfaces describes the limiting behavior of canonical (Arakelov) measures on finite covers in relation to the hyperbolic measure. I will present a generalized version of this theorem for metric graphs. (Joint work with Chenxi Wu.)

A set $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ is called spectral if the space $L^2(\Omega)$ admits an orthogonal basis of exponential functions. Back in 1974 B. Fuglede conjectured that spectral sets could be characterized geometrically by their ability to tile the space by translations. Although since then the subject has been extensively studied, the precise connection between spectrality and tiling is still a mystery.>In the talk I will survey the subject and discuss some recent results, joint with Nir Lev, where we focus on the conjecture for convex polytopes.

Thesis defense: Advisors: Turgay Uzer and Cristel Chandre Summary: Thirty years after the demonstration of the production of high laser harmonics through nonlinear laser-gas interaction, high harmonic generation (HHG) is being used to probe molecular dynamics in real time and is realizing its technological potential as a tabletop source of attosecond pulses in the XUV to soft X-ray range. Despite experimental progress, theoretical efforts have been stymied by the excessive computational cost of first-principles simulations and the difficulty of systematically deriving reduced models for the non-perturbative, multiscale interaction of an intense laser pulse with a macroscopic gas of atoms. In this thesis, we investigate first-principles reduced models for HHG using classical mechanics. On the microscopic level, we examine the recollision process---the laser-driven collision of an ionized electron with its parent ion---that drives HHG. Using nonlinear dynamics, we elucidate the indispensable role played by the ionic potential during recollisions in the strong-field limit. On the macroscopic level, we show that the intense laser-gas interaction can be cast as a classical field theory. Borrowing a technique from plasma physics, we systematically derive a hierarchy of reduced Hamiltonian models for the self-consistent interaction between the laser and the atoms during pulse propagation. The reduced models can accommodate either classical or quantum electron dynamics, and in both cases, simulations over experimentally-relevant propagation distances are feasible. We build a classical model based on these simulations which agrees quantitatively with the quantum model for the propagation of the dominant components of the laser field. Subsequently, we use the classical model to trace the coherent buildup of harmonic radiation to its origin in phase space. In a simplified geometry, we show that the anomalously high frequency radiation seen in simulations results from the delicate interplay between electron trapping and higher energy recollisions brought on by propagation effects.